Every year around this time, I get a little wistful as our yoga teacher trainees prepare for their graduation. After almost 10 months during which my co-teacher Sharon and I guided and supported these fabulous people in delving into the aspects of yoga that aren’t typically addressed in a standard yoga class, I feel compelled to write a love letter of sorts. I can’t believe how lucky I am to be co-leading this exploration, and I’m amazed that though the point of the program is for us to teach them, I always learn so much from working with our trainees.

So here’s my love letter to our trainees (current and past), a thank you for just a few of the things I’ve learned from watching such dedicated practitioners grow into teachers.

This yoga business is so much more than stretching and strengthening: it can change your life

It’s been a long time since my first teacher training back in 1998, and every year when I watch our trainees discover all the other aspects of the practice and tradition that go beyond poses on a yoga mat, I’m reminded of how life-changing it can be to delve into the introspection and self-study that are imbedded in the larger philosophy of yoga. Our trainees excitedly share how their daily interactions with friends and family have changed since exploring the yamas (ethical guidelines for relationship to others) and niyamas (personal practices/observances), they talk of their new appreciation of the koshas (sheaths or layers of being) and how they’ve begun to observe themselves on more subtle levels as a result.

As a new practitioner and budding teacher myself almost twenty years ago, I remember how thrilling it was to realize that by contemplating these new concepts I could better recognize my own habits and patterns both in relationship with others and towards myself. Having always felt myself to be a self-confident person, I was blown away when we’d explore meditation practice and it was like someone had cranked up the volume on the self-hate radio station in my brain. Those first few years of practice was all about turning the volume down and eventually changing the channel altogether. If letting go of negative self-talk isn’t life changing, I don’t know what is.

I practice for my 80 year-old self

Yoga’s not just for the young and fit (thank goodness!). Each year when we ask about our trainees’ future plans to teach, more and more of them express a desire to share yoga with an older population with more limited mobility and different concerns/goals. This, to me, is such a huge victory. Of course it can be fun as a young, fit person to sweat your way into some crazy arm balance or backbend if that’s your thing, but that’s not what has kept me interested in yoga all these years. I practice for my 80 year-old self. I practice to give myself the best possible chance at staying active and healthy as I age, despite whatever life may throw at me. I’m proud that our amazing trainees are emerging from the program with a broader view of yoga for the long run and I know they’ll make the yoga world a better place as they offer the practice in an accessible way for people of all ages in a variety of environments.

Start small and keep your friends close (and your books closer!)

Over the past few weeks we’ve asked our trainees to reflect upon their teaching journey thus far and where they see themselves going from here. When I finished my first teacher training, I was overwhelmed by the vastness of the subject I had just scraped the surface on (my first training was a one month intensive!). I knew there was so much more I had to learn, but wasn’t sure where to go next with my studies and practice. I just wanted to consider myself done and move on because I didn’t have a clear direction.

Our trainees are studying the same vast subject and have identified both the aspects of the practice they’ve started to become more familiar with (for many of them it’s pranayama and meditation), as well as the places they know need time for further exploration (for most it’s the rich philosophical study of yoga that we’ve been working on them with consistently over the course of the program). They all have their own strategies, but there’s a consistent theme of being patience, starting small, picking one or two areas to dive into next, and repeating for the long-term. They’re so wise – it took me years to figure that out and I’m grateful to be reminded of this sensible and practical approach. Wouldn’t life be better if we looked at everything this way? Just start with one small step, research, explore, then move to the next thing when you’re ready. Imagine how much you could grow if you always had a subject you were studying. Though our trainees are sad to see our twice weekly sessions come to a close (as are Sharon and I!), they know that they can continue their yoga schooling on their own because they have each other for support (their group picture says it all - they're pretty awesome folks!).

The community they’ve built is amazing. They hang out socially, share favorite new yoga books and websites, and support each other in times of need. The further away from teacher training you get, the harder it is to maintain this community and support. But our trainees in years past are still going strong, encouraging and inspiring each other, and I know they are better teachers for it. They inspire me to reinvest in my own community of yoga teacher peers and to seek out new resources to continue my own growth.

To all of our teacher trainees past and present, thank you for trusting us to guide you in this adventure and for bringing your full selves to our work together. I am a better teacher for knowing you all!

The journey starts again this fall for a new group of trainees. There’s still time to join us! Learn more about our 200 hour hatha yoga teacher training on our website or reach out to me directly.

As we’ve been celebrating and reflecting on Bloom’s 10 year anniversary with our staff, teachers, and students over the past month, certain conversational themes have continually reemerged.

“Can you believe it’s been 10 years? How does it feel?”

They’re hard questions to answer. On one hand it feels like the time has flown by, and on the other I can’t remember what used to occupy my thoughts when I wasn’t musing about yoga class schedules, massage appointments, the best way to build community, or how to continually improve our teacher training curriculum. I can’t recall a time when I didn’t have to fight the urge to keep working late at night or on weekends because of a pesky sentence in my latest blog post that just wasn’t quite right.

How do you describe the experience of spending each day focused on the tasks at hand – gradually growing our class offerings and developing new programs – then waking up one day at a party with 100 smiling faces toasting the fact that 10 wonderful years have gone by?

It feels like a time warp, it feels just right, it feels like yoga. Now a decade in, I know so much more about what’s important and where to let go.

When Zach and I were first married 14 years ago, we struggled to find that very balance. We were young, strong-willed, competitive, playful, and fiercely in love. Our good days were exquisitely fun, inspiring, and full of laughter. Our bad days, well….

We spent a lot of time in those first few years learning how to fight. At our weekly doubles tennis match with another young couple, half the time one of us would throw a racket or storm off the court enraged at the others’ unsatisfactory play, and we wouldn’t talk to each other for the rest of the day. Those fights felt so important in the moment (and surely they were – I mean, tennis is serious business). Our poor tennis friends couldn’t understand why we cared this much about a game. But it wasn’t what we were fighting about that mattered. What mattered was learning to communicate, to disagree, to express strong emotions, and to parse out what counts and what should just be forgiven and forgotten.

Thanks to those tumultuous early years and our hours of conversational nit-picking, after slugging through day after day of little fights, pettiness, and silliness, Zach and I are now able to work our way through a disagreement in a much more civilized way. So much so that I sometimes have a similar shock of recognition, a feeling of amazement as if I just woke up one day and we knew how to communicate. Because it's such a stark contrast it can be tempting to see it as more a magical transformation than a gradual evolution, as if those 14 years of consistent conversations had nothing to do with it. But truly, it was slow and often very painful (especially for our friends who had to witness it), and now here we are.

My relationship with Bloom has undergone a similar evolution, though fortunately much less dramatically since Zach and my relationship provided the training wheels for learning this process of gradual change. Rather than having to deal with drama or petty fights at Bloom, challenging incidents would pop up, like in early 2005 at our very first Midnight Yoga workshop when we had 35 enrolled students and a waitlist and we also discovered a serious leak in the studio where class was to be held just an hour before start time. I ran around like a crazy person, placing buckets and towels and calling our property management company with politely-worded threats about why this was an emergency that needed immediate resolution (as if a leak is ever that easy). Though it was not how I’d envisioned our first big workshop going, class went fine despite the musical accompaniment of drops in buckets and a blue tarp sprawled across a ladder decorating the room.

What I know now after years of day-in and day-out operations is that there's always something. In the early years, I’d face a challenge that seemed devastating at the time (a beloved teacher moving out of state, an unhappy student, a leak, a technology fail that meant we couldn’t run credit cards during a busy class sign-in). As I was dealing with the incident I’d console myself with the thought that when this was over, things would go back to normal.

But like life and love, there’s no normal with a small business. There is only change. The yoga of long-term commitment is knowing that you can’t always predict what the change will look like, but if you let go a little and roll with it, you’ll make it through just fine.

As a young married couple and new business owners we approached every problem like it was the first time anyone in the world had faced such a challenge, but 10+ years of commitment and consistency has shown us that, thankfully, we are not unique. The world has seen infinite other loves, other fights, other businesses before us, and will see many more after us.

10+ years feels like trust and steadiness, even when the ground is shaky. It’s knowing that when the city tore up our street right before our big 10 year anniversary party, it was inconvenient but survivable. We trust that opening our doors every day and doing our very best has gotten us this far, and will move us into the future, too. I’m infinitely grateful for both my wonderful husband and the incredible community that is Bloom. These experiences of love, challenge, and commitment have helped me grow in more ways than I can name. Here’s to the next 10 years of both, day by day. I can only imagine where we’ll go in that time.

The Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program that has been an amazing source of information, ideas, and support (as well as the cause of many late nights spent at my computer) came to a close a few weeks ago, and I'm still processing all that I learned along the way.

In a nutshell, the 3-month program provides small business owners with a practical education in how to better run their business as well as access to support in pursuing an opportunity to grow. I learned so many great things that I've already begun to apply at the studio, and the program opened my eyes to new ways to see both my role at Bloom and the direction we're headed.

The buzz word of the program was growth - what it means, why it's important, and how to make it happen. I struggled against what I initially perceived to be pressure to prioritize profit over passion and purpose. The more I compared myself to other business owners or to external expectations for growth, the more I began to feel off-kilter and confused. Midway through the program, I panicked. Should I be trying to come up with some brilliant new yoga gimmick? Should I be a business owner who aims to put a yoga studio on every corner? Should my ambitions be bigger?

This line of thinking sent me down a dark, bumpy path of self-doubt and judgment. So I did what I always do when I feel off-center and disconnected: I rolled out my yoga mat.

I've come to the mat thousands of times before, but each has been a new experience. Some days I've had a spark of inspiration in child's pose and had to scramble to find pen and paper to write out (in my terrible chicken scratch) the next Thinking Yogi post or article I want to publish. On other days, I've forced myself through a practice that felt dull and uninispired wondering why I didn't just stay in bed.

But despite all of the confusion in my head and heart that day, despite the stress and self-doubt and worry I felt over whether the growth I was contemplating was 'right,' coming to the mat made things so simple, so clear. I sat tall, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and found my smile.

Bloom's vision is my vision for my own life, too.

I want to be happy and healthy. I want to experience and enjoy the present moment rather than constantly striving. I want do purposeful work that I love, connect with good people, grow and change, and be creative and inspired.

The growth I'm seeking at Bloom isn't all about the bottom line. The reason I started the studio is to make wellness more accessible. I believe yoga and massage can help people to feel happier and healthier in daily life, and I wanted to create a community that makes it easy and fun for people of all ages, stages of life, and levels of fitness or flexibility to give it a go. Every new class or program we've offered has been a direct result of that core belief.

Yes, the bottom line is important, but it's not what gets me up in the morning. I'm inspired by sharing what I love with others, excited when yoga and massage changes someone's whole day-to-day experience of life, thrilled when our students consider Bloom their home away from home.

So with all that said, just what sort of growth is in store for Bloom?

Here's what I'm excited about!

Promoting wellbeing at work - bringing stress-reduction and wellness (via yoga, massage, and meditation) to more folks right where they work

After initially having moments of self-doubt and judgement in the program when I tried to fit myself into a certain business owner mold because I thought I 'should,' I soon realized that there is no one right way to grow. When I look at these four areas of growth I know what lies ahead at the studio is organic and true and aligned with our vision. And so we continually cycle back to what we do best, we revisit and revamp what we love, we grow, we Bloom.

I'm pleased that the wonderful, positive online community MindBodyGreen posted my article "Fear No Yoga" this week. The article examines the myriad of responses the yoga community has had to the recent NYT article "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body." But it looks at them from a new perspective: how fear influences our relationship with yoga practice.

In the article I talk about an exercise on fear that my colleague Sharon Wentz led for our teacher trainees this fall. The process of uncovering and better understanding our fears can be informative and empowering, particularly in relationship to our yoga practice.

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Kerry Maiorca

Passionate about yoga, writing, and creativity in general, Kerry is the Founder & Director of Bloom Yoga Studio. Her Thinking Yogi blog explores the intersection of yoga and everyday life, and you can also find her writing on Huffington Post, elephantjournal, MindBodyGreen, yoganonymous, and Yoga Chicago. Kerry and her husband Zach live in Chicago with their three children who love to "help" when she practices yoga in the living room.